ABSTRACT
The “current of major events,” the massive political and technological revolutions of the Weimar Republic, made the present day itself become, in the eyes of contemporaries, a gigantic current of energy that menaced everyone with its “deadly shock.”—That, at least, is how the official advertisement by the Berlin Allotment Gardening Exhibition, “Sun, Air, and Home for All!” of 1932 phrased it:
Our time is so full of mighty upheavals and forceful events, most people are so swept up in the current of major events, that they hardly see how other special currents of energy are flowing alongside the large, roaring flow. If these energies did not exist, our time would be a thousand times more gruesome than it already is and, after those years of war and scarcity, would have ground the individual down. It is the lofty purpose of those energies to dampen that deadly shock of our time, its qualities and conditions, and rescue the individual and keep it viable. 1
